Turning on the Ghost Light

According to tradition, theaters always leave a light on when they’re empty. Superstition says it’s to keep ghosts away, hence the name: ghost light. Others suggest that keeping a light on is simply a safety precaution. The romantic in me likes to think it’s a signal that the regular inhabitants are only gone for a moment and will be back soon, before the light burns out. For a variety of reasons (end-of-summer lethargy, too many hours spent watching the Olympics) there will be no post today. I'll be back, as usual, on Saturday but I’m turning on the ghost light while I’m away.

The Tiny Pleasures of "Summer Shorts 2"

It’s festival season in New York. And that means adventurous theatergoers are in the midst of a summer-long smorgasbord of new and avantgarde plays and musicals. I made it to The Bacchae at the Lincoln Center Festival but passed on its Beckett trilogy. I missed the Summer Play Festival that showcased emerging writers and directors at the Public Theater last month but I’m planning to catch at least one show in The New York International Fringe Festival that started last week. I confess I don’t know anything about the American Living Room’s performance arts fest currently at the Here Arts Center but I’m looking forward to the New York Musical Theatre Festival that starts next month. And last night, my buddy Bill and I went to the first half of Summer Shorts 2, the festival of eight new short plays that is running through Aug. 28 at the 59E59 Theaters. (Click here to read a roundtable discussion with four festival directors.)

This is just the second year for Summer Shorts but it’s clearly caught on because the performance we attended was sold out and the hum of self-satisfaction that's always detectable at a cool event vibrated through the crowd. Almost as if to confirm the show’s hip status, a recording by the eternally-hip Miles Davis played over the sound system as audience members settled into their seats and later while the two-person stage crew changed props between scenes.

There are two programs of plays being performed in Summer Shorts 2 and the one we saw, Series A, includes works by the playwrights Leslie Lyles, Eduardo Machado, Neil Koenigsberg and Roger Hedden. Their works range from a tragic monologue to a four-person social satire. All four were nicely directed and, for the most part, ably acted but, as Bill observed, none seemed any more substantial than the kind of character studies you might find being performed in just about any acting class.

Which doesn’t mean they weren’t diverting. The crowd-pleaser was Koenigsberg’s On A Bench, an encounter between a young affluent man (David Beck) and an older working class woman (Mary Joy) who meet on a bench across the street from the Stonewall Inn, the birthplace of the modern gay rights movement. But I was most taken by Amy Irving’s performance in Lyles’ The Waters of March which almost connected the dots in a lightly etched tale about a failed lounge singer and made me curious about what Lyle might do on a broader canvas.

Curtain time at Summer Shorts is scheduled for a fashionably late 8:15 and our performance was over around 9:45, allowing enough time to get home and catch a little of the Olympics on TV, a bonus that both Bill and I welcomed. After all, even the most ardent theater lover can appreciate aquaman Michael Phelps’s quest for eight gold medals, the debate over whether the pixyish Chinese female gymnasts are underage and all the other dramas that are grabbing the spotlight in Beijing.

Youth, Love and "Twelfth Night"

Summer always makes me think of Shakespeare. That’s probably because I was a kid when Joe Papp started staging free performances of the Bard’s plays in New York City parks on hot weather nights back in the 1950s and ‘60s. Seeing those shows was a big deal in my working class neighborhood. “You going to see the Shakespeare tonight?” people would ask when they bumped into one another at the corner grocery store or coming out of the subway from work.

It was a rhetorical question. Just about everyone went whenever the shows played in our nearby park. Our family would eat an early supper, then walk the few blocks to the playground to get good seats in the temporary bleachers that had been set up there. I don’t remember which plays we saw back then and I can’t tell you if they were well done or not but I do know how much I looked forward to them, how wonderful they seemed to me and what a good time we all had. It's how I first fell in love with theater.

Over the years, I’ve experienced some of that same tingle of wonder whenever I went to see Shakespeare productions in Central Park but eventually the lines to get a free ticket got too long and the prices that you had to pay to skip to the head of the queue got too high (this year, you had to “donate” $150 a seat per show) and so it’s been a while since I’ve seen one there. Which may explain why I so appreciated my evening at the Pulse Ensemble Theatre Company’s production of Twelfth Night.

Pulse performs at various outdoor venues around the city. I caught its Twelfth Night at The Amphitheatre at the Riverbank State Park, where it’s playing through Aug. 24. The entrance to the park is at 145th Street and Riverside Drive and the amphitheater overlooks the Hudson River. On a balmy night, it’s an idyllic setting for Shakespeare’s romantic romp about cross dressing lovers, mistaken identities and the follies of arrogance.

This production updates the action to the present (the characters carry iPods) and moves the location from Shakespeare’s Illyria to “a City much resembling New York City.” It also adds a lot of interstitial pop music that ranges from Elvis to Led Zeppelin, dating it in a different kind of way. The sound system seemed anachronistic too, flickering in and out or bursting into static that made the dialog unintelligible at times. But the cast was game.

In the true spirit of Papp (who, if he wasn’t the first, was certainly the most enthusiastic non-traditional caster) the actors were diverse in every way—by race, age, and, truth be told, by talent too. Raushanah Simmons, a Michelle Obama-look-alike who has appeared in Public Theater productions, as Viola; and Annie Paul, a recent college grad from Ohio debuting in her first New York show, as Olivia came off best but everyone seemed to be having a good time.

The folks in the audience too. There were only about a 100 or so of us but we were also a multicultural lot. I saw a few middle-aged white couples, an Hispanic mom and dad with their four daughters, a quartet of white twentysomethings who brought along a picnic basket of goodies (a smart idea; a glass or two of wine would have made the evening perfect for me) and a black teenager with what seemed to be his three younger brothers. One of the boys was so excited by what he was seeing on stage that he couldn’t stay in his seat (a concrete bench; so bring a cushion) and literally whooped with delight at the silly antics of the play’s clownish Sir Toby Belch and Sir Andrew Aguecheek, proof that Shakespeare can hold his own with the "Kung Fu Panda" generation.

The brothers left before the show ended. I thought it was because the eldest was tired of trying to rein in his siblings. But it might have been because he knew that the No. 11 bus, which you can ride right into the park, stops running before the lovers are properly sorted out and the supercilious Malvolio gets his comeuppance. You can walk the few blocks to Broadway and get the subway but not even being semi-stranded marred the evening for me. This Twelfth Night was far from a midsummer’s night dream. But it did transport me back to those summers evenings of my girlhood and the start of my ongoing romance with the theater.

There Is Nothin' Like A Great Cast Album

My California friends Bill and Joyce visited New York last month and, of course, they wanted to see some Broadway shows. I suggested the Tony winners August: Osage County, In the Heights and South Pacific. They got tickets to the first two and while they really enjoyed August, they were knocked out by In the Heights. Earlier this week Bill emailed to tell me that they’d just ordered the cast album. If they could have gotten into the sold-out South Pacific, they might also have bought its sensational new cast recording.

If you love Broadway musicals, then you probably own a bunch of cast albums too. They’re the closest way we’ve got to bring the thrill of a musical home. But I confess to envying cinephiles whose DVDs of their favorite movies come with all kinds of special features, like director's commentaries and making-of videos. With cast albums, what you see (or hear) is pretty much all you get.

It wasn’t always that way. In the golden era that began with the original cast recording of Oklahoma!, which came out on six discs in 1943, the major record studios released recordings on multiple LPs that were often accompanied by coffee-table-sized souvenir books, color photos, liner notes, and lyric sheets. But in the Dark Ages of the 1970s and ‘80s the labels started backing away from recording shows, sometimes trimming their scores to fit on just one LP and often jettisoning most of the extras.

Since 2001, Sh-K-Boom and Ghostlight Records, owned by Sherie Rene Scott, who’s currently in The Little Mermaid, and her husband Kurt Deutsch, have been recording hits, flops and cult favorites (In the Heights and Passing Strange are among their recent releases; a version of [title of show] came out in 2006). And all praise to them for doing so. But these new recordings and the few produced by other labels come out on CDs (or as digital downloads) and their extras have to be crammed into that small space.

So although I’ve written about it before, I’m giving another big shoutout to the folks at Sony Masterworks Broadway. Their original cast recording of the new Lincoln Center production of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s South Pacific came out right before the show won the Tony award for Best Revival. And while the actual CD comes in the customary no-frills packaging, there are loads of extras online, including some truly terrific podcasts that can be downloaded to your iPod.

Nearly everyone connected with the show has recorded his or her thoughts about it and there are eight separate podcasts, running in length from eight minutes to 22. Kelli O’Hara talks about how she based Nellie Forbush’s racial attitudes on those of her grandmother, a southerner who grew up in the 1930s and was “carefully taught certain things.” Loretta Ables Sayre expresses how much it means to her to be the first woman from the South Pacific to play Bloody Mary. Director Bartlett Sher explains how he cast the show and battled the ghosts of Mary Martin and Enzio Pinza. But my favorite is Bert Fink, the head of publicity for the Rodgers and Hammerstein Organization, who is a font of tidbits about the history of the musical including what happened on the closing night of the original production.

Videos and photos from the recording session (and what straight woman or gay guy doesn’t want another look at the show's leading man Paulo Szot) as well as a sampling of songs from the album are available on the website, masterworksbroadway.com/south-pacific/ (click here to go there). You can find all of the podcasts on iTunes. It's all totally enchanting and totally free.

A Bittersweet Elegy for "Buffalo Gal"

My sister Joanne turned me down when I invited her to see Buffalo Gal, the new A.R. Gurney play that just opened at Primary Stages. “I’m not in the mood for an Annie Oakley kind of thing,” she told me, apparently imagining a non-musical version of Annie Get Your Gun. But Buffalo Gal has nothing to do with sharpshooting or steer wrangling. Its heroine is a once-successful TV actress named Amanda who tries to fire up her career by starring as Madame Ranevskaya in a production of Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard for a struggling theater company back in her hometown of Buffalo, N.Y. As she sees it, doing theater helped Angela Lansbury and Carol Burnett, why shouldn’t it help her?

Joanne, always a big TV fan, liked this storyline a lot better and so off we went to the 59E59 Theater, where Buffalo Gal is playing through Sept. 13. The play runs just a little over 90 minutes but it’s chocked full of stuff. In fact, if you’re the kind of theatergoer who likes a play that gives you something to chew on, then your jaws will probably get tired before you’re done with Buffalo Gal.

First off, there’s The Cherry Orchard parallel: the mirror stories of aristocratic women returning home to reclaim an impoverished patrimony. Then there’s the theme of the pauper's role theater plays in our fame-hungry culture: just as the play’s rehearsals begin, Amanda is offered a new sitcom and has to choose between the two. There’s also art imitating life: Gurney left his native Buffalo years ago but has returned often to stage his plays there and although Susan Sullivan, who plays Amanda, is an accomplished stage performer with both Broadway and regional credits on her résumé, she’s best known as a TV actor who’s had starring roles in shows like “Falcon Crest” and “Dharma & Greg (click here to read a revealing interview with her).”

And, of course, since this is a play by the author of such works as The Dining Room, The Cocktail Hour and Love Letters, there’s the whole end of the WASP era thing. In this case, it’s represented by Amanda’s high-school boyfriend Dan, played by Mark Blum, who grew up to become a Jewish dentist but who never grew out of his love for his shiksa goddess and the evanescent world she symbolizes.

That’s an awful lot of weight for such a small play to carry. And I haven’t even mentioned the storylines about the lesbian director, the African-American leading man or the stage manager with deaf parents. All of this means there’s a lot of tell and not quite enough show in Buffalo Gal. Still, much of the tell is amusing. And the actors, particularly the women—Sullivan, Jennifer Regan as the director, and Carmen M. Herlihy as an overly sincere intern—give appealing performances.

But what won me over is Gurney’s unabashed love for the theater and the people who make it. Including, seemingly, those Hollywood emigres whom we so often dismiss as doing theater the way college applicants do volunteer work in Third World countries: an ostentatiously trendy way to pick up some Brownie points.

Watching Gurney’s Amanda wrestle with whether to stay in Buffalo with the play or go to Hollywood and grab the sitcom, gave me a new perspective on how much courage it must take for a movie or TV star to go before a live audience eight times a week, on how admirable it is for folks who can earn millions to agree to work for relative pocket change, on how the very fact that screen actors seek legitimacy by doing stage work bestows added authority on the theater. Instead of griping the next time I read about some movie star coming to Broadway, I’m going to be grateful and more supportive.

“I thought it was cute,” my sister said after we left the theater and walked across town to find something to eat. I think Buffalo Gal is more than that. For Gurney has written a love letter to contemporary theater and despite its shortcomings, I have a feeling that regional companies across the country will return his affection with productions of this play for years to come. Unfortunately the Studio Arena Theatre in his native Buffalo won't be one of them; it filed for bankruptcy and closed earlier this year.

To Subscribe or Not To Subscribe...That Is Now the Question for True Theater Lovers

After all these years of theatergoing, I just had a first-time experience: I signed up for a subscription series. In fact, I subscribed to two: The Public Theater's and the Signature Theatre's.

I’m not sure what took me so long to take advantage of this smart way of seeing plays and supporting the companies that produce them. Subscriptions are great for theater lovers like me, because you not only get first crack at seats to the most anticipated shows but other goodies like newsletters, invitations to receptions with cast members and cheaper ticket prices. And they’re also great for the theater companies because they get a pot of upfront money that makes it easier for them to manage their budgets and keep their operations running.

If you see enough off-Broadway or regional theater, your mailbox has probably been filled over the past few weeks with brochures touting various company’s new seasons and all the benefits of subscribing to them. Prices for New York-based packages run from a mighty $1,800 for the Champions Circle at 2econd Stage Theatre (it includes two premium seats to every production, invitations to three opening night performances and cast parties and “recognition in our 43rd Street theatre for one year”) to the Atlantic Theater Company's $55 membership fee that buys you the right to pay no more than $25 for any its shows.

The Public and Signature are two of my favorite companies. I love the Public because its programming is so diverse and adventurous and the Signature because its focus on a singular oeuvre allows me to really dig into one artistic vision. So I’d like to say that I subscribed to them because I wanted to show my appreciation and support. But the truth is that I signed up for far more selfish reasons.

When my pal Bill first suggested that we sign up for the Public, I turned him down. But then I realized that the season includes the new production of Bounce, the Stephen Sondheim musical that has been literally bouncing around in various incarnations over the past decade. Having seen a couple of those earlier versions, I wanted to make sure I could get a seat for this one. And my subscription will guarantee that.

Two years ago, I missed out on the entire season the Signature dedicated to August Wilson because I figured I’d just get tickets for each individual show. But the word-of-mouth was so good and the $20 ticket price (subsidized by Time Warner) so low that all the performances sold out before I could even get to one. This year, Signature is devoting its season to works that were originally produced by The Negro Ensemble Company, which is celebrating its 40th anniversary. I remember seeing each work when it premiered and I want to be sure that I can see them again. And a subscription guarantees me that too.

So it’s good for me and for the folks at those companies who now know that whatever kind of reviews their shows get, they’ve already sold seats to me, Bill and their other subscribers. But I also worry about the future of subscriptions. Earlier this year, I heard Todd Haimes, artistic director of The Roundabout Theatre Company, which has over 40,000 subscribers, say that a growing number of the most loyal theatergoers are turning to discount clubs like Theatermania which offers reduced-price tickets to individual shows instead of requiring a commitment to a full season. That may eventually affect the steady flow of cash that the companies depend on. Others fret that the companies are already starting to program the way commercial producers do, opting for choices that will appeal to the largest number of people instead of presenting riskier fare.

We clearly need non-profit theaters. And we need them to be adventurous. They need subscriptions. But I’m just not sure what my role here should be. Should I use my limited dollars to subscribe to a bunch of companies? Or should I buy tickets to the shows that I most like, which often tend to be the edgier productions that wouldn't get commercial runs, to encourage them to continue that kind of programming? I really would love to hear from those of you who subscribe and those of you don’t about why and how you’ve made that choice. In the meantime, I am looking forward to a season full of trips to the Public and Signature.

The Hometown Paper for Theater Lovers

We New Yorkers can be a provincial lot. Particularly when it comes to theater. Although, in our defense, that’s somewhat understandable. For to paraphrase what was once said of Rome, all stage roads seem to lead to Broadway. But, of course, many of those journeys—be it that of the Steppenwolf Theatre Company’s August: Osage County from Chicago or the Intiman Theatre’s original production of The Light in the Piazza in Seattle—began, and were nurtured, elsewhere. And there’s no better survey of the lay of that land than the Theatre Communications Group’s magazine, “American Theatre.”

One of the hottest topics in media circles is whether newspapers and magazines are becoming obsolete now that people can find all kinds of information on the web. I’m clearly an Internet fan (you are, after all, reading my blog) but I was weaned on paper and ink and I first started writing about theater for print publications, including the late and still-lamented (at least by me) “TheatreWeek.” So although reading theater blogs is now as much a part of my daily routine as my morning shower, it's a special pleasure for me to be able to kick back with an edifying magazine. And I had a great time this week when I sat on our terrace going through the summer issue of “American Theatre.”

The Theatre Communications Group is the trade organization that promotes some 460 non-profit theaters across the country. Its activities range from hosting conferences where theater administrators can trade ideas to organizing programs like Free Night of Theater, which offers free tickets to first time theatergoers; this year’s event is scheduled to take place on Oct. 16 in over 100 cities (click here for more info).

TCG also produces several publications including “American Theatre,” which is kind of a hometown paper for the community of theater lovers across the country. Each issue includes interviews with showmakers, discussions of issues facing the industry, reviews, a calendar of the shows scheduled at theaters in just about every state in the nation, plus the complete text of a new play. Even the ads (from publishers peddling books on theater, schools touting their theater curricula, and companies announcing their new seasons) are worthwhile reading.

Yes, you can find most of this information by trolling various websites. But how handy to have it all brought together in one place by folks who not only love theater but really know it. (Those of you who can’t stand to tear yourself away from the screen can find excerpts by clicking here). The current issue features an intimate interview with Nicholas Martin, the new head of the venerable Williamstown Theatre Festival; excerpts from a discussion with three successful playwrights about the pluses and minuses of writing for the stage versus the screen; a comprehensive review of this spring’s Humana Festival of New American Plays in Louisville, Ky., a look at an innovative program that gets college kids into theaters and a first-person assessment of whether it’s a conflict of interest for theater critics to be friendly with the folks whose shows they critique.

But what I like best is how comparatively little of the magazine focuses on New York. It’s a reminder for those of us in the city of how much good theater there is in the rest of the country (I'm already itching to get to Kentucky next spring) and for those of you who live hundreds or even thousands of miles away from Broadway of how easily—and fulfillingly—you can satisfy your theater jones until you get here.